Even Bought A Mallet

 

Friday.  The sun’s up.  I’m so glad this week is done.  My dad suggested we go to the ‘duck pond’ for our morning hike.  I’d imagined that he meant the pond behind his home, which wouldn’t mean much of a hike.  “No.  Not the one at my place.  You’ve been there before.”  And with a bit of description, yes, I remembered the place he had in mind, at the end of Pine Road, off Buttermilk road that runs along beneath the Trapps and Skytop.  This morning we rendezvoused there, at small lot near the end of Pine Road. 

 

And where we took a path to the left last time, we cut right and upwards this time, passing over the NYC aqueduct feed and passed a few private dwellings that abut the park.  Once bitten, my dad was insistent that we not, head up the next right fork.  "I got spun around doing that last time and it took me hours to undue." We kept left, walking passed a remarkable view down all the way across to Dutchess County on the east side of the river, and came upon a field-seismograph, which my father had been mentioning.  Not exactly the San Andreas fault, but apparently this area is seismically active, which makes sense with these commanding cliffs rising and cascading here as they do.

Further along we had particularly nice view of Skytop.  This is much closer beneath the peak than the view I caught last time I was up here.  The road cuts down around a corner and we met the first people we’d seen the whole morning heading up the other direction.  The duck pond down below was where we had turned around last time.  There’s a pathway that winds around it up into the wooded slope, but my father was convinced it would be a muddy mess.  Down at the water’s edge the geese first and then the ducks swam to the other side away to the other side of the pond and we both wondered why it was, the two species seemed to get along so well.

Intrigued by my daughter’s suggestion that she wanted tonkatsu pork, I tried to orient the evening meal around something Japanese.  I got the panko breadcrumbs and even bought a mallet to beat down the pork paddies with.  Eh. Good but not great.  Deep frying rarely seems to work out the way you want it to.  And Japanese food remains one of the more challenging cuisines to convincingly replicate at home. 

 

 

 

Friday, 12/04/20